Editorial Preface
July-August 2013
As the pages of Solidarité are written, a concrete struggle is
being waged. Expressed in a myriad of ways, the battle between wagelabor and capital is becoming ever more intense. Neoliberalism is
fueling the greatest destruction of public assets since the fall of the
Soviet Union, while the Dow Jones – the lifeblood of finance
capitalism – is doing better than ever. What is being seen by many as a
crisis of capitalism is in fact a great success...
Capitalism is fulfilling its purpose in some senses better than
ever. But this does not mean better for us. The strength of the logic of
capital lies in its ability to be cohesive yet antagonistic. It also has as its
weapon the force of habit and ideology. All of this must be taken into
consideration. Such is why this project has been formulated. Marx,
Engels, and countless other revolutionaries have held above all one
principle: the working class must emancipate itself. Self-published by
workers and students, Solidarité offers a forum for serious discussion in
the field of radical left theory, philosophy, and politics. However, the
words written on these pages are meaningless until gripped by the
masses. Lenin stated that newspapers could be the collective
propagandist, agitator, and organizer of the people. Though a journal, it
is with this spirit that Solidarité is being built. Our goal is not to inform
the working class from above, but as fellow workers. To collectively
engage in a ruthless critique of all that exists. To demystify and expose
the exploitation and alienation inherent in capitalism in the only way
possible i.e., through profound class consciousness. To elucidate the
doctrine of our collective emancipation as well as to facilitate it. As
Adorno once said, the bourgeois' love of man stems from his hatred of
what man might become.
Long live the revolutionary class struggle!
Until victory, always!

The emergence of protests with no figurehead, no
leadership organizations has been hailed by some as a success
and as the new progression within the left.
There is a problem of relationship to authority that is
addressed improperly by the ‘Communist’ intellectual. In this we
see the modern and postmodern generational divide. Those who
have existed exclusively in the postmodern context do not thirst
for central authority; they despise it. Beyond this underlying
sentiment which is present in discourse, there lies something else.
A way of curtailing authority. The hidden anonymity of the
disposable multitude. One person can be tortured, humiliated,
dissected. One person can betray the interest of a group. The
problem is many fold, but relates to the ability to neutralize
charismatic figures within resistance movements. A leader can
be humiliated through their sexuality, a leader can be exposed as
criminal, can be the subject of tabloid reporting. A leader can be
dissected publicly. There motivations can be assigned by a
narrative. This systemic correction is a product of state agencies
and media's ability to find out information about individuals
which can be used to divert understandings of situations away
from the substantial claims of an organization., Instead, they
have a person that can be envisioned as responsible for the
actions of the group.
American media apparatuses that exist to serve this
function, that of the scaffolds and executioners, do not either
have the format to do so nor the attention of the demographics
necessary to witness such an event. The medium is limited, and
the message must fit into the parameters of the sixty second

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sentence. Instead what we see is vague explanations of
motivations which surely can not encapsulate these new nonorganization organizations. What we see in this is a perverse
dream of the anarchists come alive, but through the productive
methods of the Internet. The Internet was promised to change the
way we do everything, and it has done so. No longer is there an
effective blackballing of the McCarthy era. Those dismissed,
ignored or unknown to the ‘mainstream’ become Internet
spectacles.
There was no media blackout that television and news
agencies could put in place to block the effects of Tahrir Square.
It was the start of a resistance movement that would not stop. It
was the start of a resistance movement that could not stop. The
assassinations and castrations of leadership left this disposable
multitude to organize differently. There was no leader to bargain
with. There was no longer an effective system of repression.
The state structures used for repression depend on internal
structures within resistance movements to exploit, to work
within. There must be a structural element to suppress.
The lack of leadership, caused by late capitalism's
repressive apparatuses had caused a change within these
movements. Their organizational structure was a constant flux.
No longer could a handful of undercover police officers identify
leaders to arrest, discredit or at the very least bargain with. The
failure of the concept of leadership had been removed.
But this resistance is not purely digital. It exists in
constant flux between hopeful radicals and Internet pirates. It
exists within a realm of that which is possible on a cellular
phone, a commodity designed for communication through
capitalist production. It exists in a group of people in the street.
These new media, ‘the Internet’, is an inversion of the old
medias, still the death rattles of this old functions of the media
echo in the new media, and in the statements and iterations of
internet users. The reproduced race, class and genders come with
them.
Copypasta will ruin everything.
come to ruin in order.
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In this we find ourselves, as lone subjects, isolated in
chairs experiencing the spectacle of revolution: no participation
required. Until it's your turn to stand in a park and scream. You
too can be part of the spectacle. Late capitalism has come to a
breaking point with its apparatuses for reproducing narratives.
Their truths must compete on the artificial markets that were
hastily constructed by opportunistic businesses working in
tandem with state agencies, trying to contain this new imaginary
space as fast as it could be constructed. It has outsourced the
most important function in media: it has crowd sourced the
news’ narrative function. It no longer has a way to construct the
narratives and can not possibly dismiss every counternarrative.
Huffington Post can be owned by whomever has the capital to
assert control over it, yet its content can not be monitored.
Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, but anyone editing must
answer to the disposable multitude. There is a different sort of
information order emerging, and it is not suited for repressing
information: this information could be purely fantasy or it could
correspond directly to states of affairs.
In the vast body of information, larger than any that has
ever existed, this information is reposited and reproduced a
million fold. This sort of historical momentum is not to be trifled
with, can not be bargained with, and can not be dissected. There
can be no show trial. It can not accuse it of perverse sexual acts.
It can not bring it into the fold. It can not have it work within the
confines of a party.
The failure of the new media to address the demand for
unfettered information leads to a system of information
production unlike the system that was in place to produce
“news”. This new system is that of a system of networks beyond
a model of comprehension. Analogies would fall shorter than to
provide meaning. Instead we can look at particulars of these
systems and speak in limited ways about what they indicate of
the whole.
The new communication and the new resistance are in the
response to specific conditions of production and specific
relationships developing to protect production.
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The distinction between the state spying apparatuses and
media is not there to be made. To understand the functioning of
said apparatus, you must understand that through observation, the
media constructs around your interests that are performed
through your actions. Clicking on things, on links on the Internet,
indicates an interest, and that interest is tracked by state
apparatuses that "tailor" your experience to match the ideology
that you yourself have demonstrated by your performance of
actions. This demonstration is the interest of the state in so much
as it allows for marketing to be targeted towards you, and
identifies aberrant behavior which can be in turn addressed by
enforcement agencies. The distinctions between these media and
security apparatuses are purely bourgeois distinctions. To the
subjects participating it is a unified phenomena.
Your subjectivity is not only known and produced
through your consumption in this new media. It is known and
produced
through your productive capacities.
The new
revolutionary practice without leadership is simultaneously
undefeatable and ineffectual. Demanding change will inevitably
lead to changes in arrangements in superstructural elements and
in forces of production. Relations of production, at least the all
important â&#x20AC;&#x153;who benefitsâ&#x20AC;? will maintain as long as leaderless
social movements maintain.

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SCHOOL OF HARD SHOCKS: THE CHICAGO SCHOOL CLOSINGS,
ECONOMIC SHOCK THERAPY, AND THE POTENTIAL FOR A
RADICAL FUTURE

Scott D. Folsom

“A subjugated land and its people becomes both the laboratory
and the raw material for reinventing the imperial self[.]” – Sarah
Hogan, “Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine:
Spenser’s Vision of Capitalist Imperialism”1
INTRODUCTION
May 22 ordinarily marks the beginning of the end of the
traditional American school year. Graduation ceremonies are
planned, final exams are administered, and students daydream of
that temporally displaced utopia called “summertime”. For
Chicagoans, the most recent May 22 was a more somber
beginning-of-the-end: it was the starting point of the closure of
fifty public schools – forty-nine elementary buildings, and one
high school – ostensibly due to budgetary constraints and
underutilization.2 Immediate public response carried a uniform
outrage, and the Chicago Teachers Union continues to pursue a
response strategy that involves both rhetoric and the utilization of
the legal ideological state apparatus3.
The closures themselves are part of a broader American
trend in education – as public funds for education become
scarcer, so do public schools, with the buildings becoming
infrastructural framework for the burgeoning charter school
industry. In a sense, code words like “underutilization” are used
as justification for the slow but orderly march of privatization
into the territory of the public school system. This spread of the
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capitalist project through the destruction or forcible seizure of
public goods calls to mind the work of Naomi Klein, specifically
her bestseller The Shock Doctrine, in which she outlines “the rise
of disaster capitalism”4. The core theme of her analysis – that,
during the postwar period, the Chicago School economists’
discovery the power of violent change to ease the implementation
of laissez-faire economic policies – offers the most coherent
means of understanding the motivation and potential endgame of
the Chicago public school liquidation sale.
The school closures also embody the Marxist class
struggle, in that they highlight the inequities caused by funding
education through a tax framework that relies upon the fiction of
private property. Consider the words of the Rev. John Thomas,
responding to an editorial in the Chicago Tribune:
“At New Trier High School in one
of the wealthier suburbs of
Chicago, all students will have
iPads for their course work by the
fall of 2014. The district will pay
about 40% of the costs, leaving
families to come up with the
remaining $350 in purchase or
leasing options. School officials
justify this by touting the
educational benefits and by
pointing out that this will allow the
school to phase out some of its
1200 laptops. One page away is an
article about the school board of the
City of Chicago which voted
yesterday afternoon to close 50
public elementary schools. In
thousands of districts like New
Trier, students are getting iPads; in
Chicago, New York, Philadelphia,
and many other places, students are

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getting moving orders and teachers
are losing jobs5.”
Thomas also highlights the ideological orientation of the
paper he critiques by describing their allocation of column
inches: plenty of space for the lambasting of teachers who dare to
question the board’s decision, with precious little space for critics
of said decision. His real contribution to the discussion, however,
comes with this mention of New Trier’s iPad acquisition. The
quality of one’s education in the United States is proximately
caused by one’s neighborhood, which is ultimately caused (as are
all things, per the Marxist hermeneutic) by one’s class.
However, the response, both in terms of the level of
involvement and the broad coalition of participants, embodies an
increasingly rare glimmer of hope for the ability of the American
populace to organize in opposition to the continued neoliberal
seizure of the commonwealth into the market. The prolific
philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek offers this framework
for understanding “radical emancipatory outbursts” such as the
protests surrounding this sale in his most recent work, The Year
of Dreaming Dangerously:
“Radical emancipatory outbursts
cannot be understood in this way:
instead of analyzing them as part of
the continuum of past and present,
we should bring in the perspective
of the future, taking them as limited,
distorted
(sometimes
even
perverted) fragments of a utopian
future that lies dormant in the
present as its hidden potential.”6
While Žižek cautions his readers against putting “too
much energy into a desperate search for the ‘germs of
Communism’,” calling these events “signs that, paradoxically,
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precede that of which they are signs,” it remains possible to
detect whether an event can be considered the “germ” of some
possible future change in the organization of society. 7 This
analysis will, thus, make provisional attempts to “read” the future
from these utopian shards, but cannot, for lack of clairvoyance,
achieve anything more than a well-evidenced hypothesis.
Together, Klein and Žižek offer a complete way of
reading the Chicago school closure strike. The combined
framework provides a means of reconciling the decidedly
dystopian recession of the public sector from the education
system with the utopian possibilities that stem from the results.
SCHOOL CLOSINGS AS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF
ECONOMIC “SHOCK THERAPY”
The process of disaster capitalism that Klein analyzes in
The Shock Doctrine often affects the educational institutions of
any body politic subjected to the economic shock treatment.
Klein herself notes two examples of this intersection: one in her
case study of the Pinochet regime, and the other in her analysis of
the Bush administration response to Hurricane Katrina 8. It is the
latter of these examples, the one closest to home, that embodies
the role of the charter school in American education: that of the
option of last resort when public resources are either unable to
meet the educational needs of the people, or when public
authorities are removed from the role of education policymaking.
In the case of Chicago, charter schools are rarely
established due to the inability of the city to supply education
resources to its youth, but rather out of the capitalist desire to
profit in the name of innovation. Surprisingly enough, one such
example comes from a previous set of school closings in
Chicago, during the directorship of now-Education Secretary
Arne Duncan – the charter established in place of one of the three
schools he closed is now “on academic probation with the threat
of closure”9. Charter schools, for better or for worse, have been
solidly engrained into the collective mind of the American
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education reform movement as a panacea for school systems in
struggle. With so many school buildings about to come on the
market, the raw material for charter school operators yearning to
reinvent the education system is in abundant supply.
The mounting evidence suggests, however, that charter
schools lack any overwhelming proof of their claims of efficacy.
The most common argument made in favor of charter schooling
is that the provision of subsidized private education 10 offers a
greater level of “school choice”. This is usually accompanied by
calls for the use of public funds to offer “vouchers” to families
who wish to send their children to privately operated schools.
This effectively rerouting public education funds to the private
sector at both the client and provider ends of the system. This is
carried out with the belief that parents will respond positively to
their experiences with charter schools, but the research provides
no conclusive evidence of this11.
Charter schools make a number of promises. Parents
come to them seeking enhanced rigor, superior safety provisions,
greater individual student guidance, and an atmosphere that
emphasizes the importance of future plans12. Do charter schools
live
up
to
these
promises?
No. Numerous studies and analyses indicate that charter schools
are not superior to their publicly administrated counterparts, and
may actually be lagging behind them 13. Despite this, charters
have become an increasingly popular policy option among both
major capitalist political parties in the U.S., and:
“The worry is that President
Obama and others are getting
seduced by the movement because
they’re looking at the results from
boutique charters [like KIPP and
Aspire] rather than at the wide
array of charters that don’t
outperform regular schools,” says
Bruce
Fuller,
an
education
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professor at the University of
California at Berkeley. Professor
Fuller
remains
“cautiously
optimistic” about charters and says
they seem to do some things well,
such as attracting energetic young
teachers. But, he adds, “It’s
irresponsible that President Obama
would [push] all 50 states to create
more charter schools in light of
such sketchy evidence.14”
Prior to the lack of definitive evidence about parent
response, and the definite negative evidence about the
effectiveness of charter schools in fulfilling their promises, are
fundamental socialist objections to Chicago’s relinquishment of
public school facilities onto the private market. First, when the
likely event comes that these school buildings are captured by the
various charter school businesses that operate across the United
States, the previously secure, unionized teaching jobs that they
once embodied will be replaced by “publicly funded but mostly
non-unionized charter schools”15. The result is that, while the
teachers whose jobs are sacrificed due to the closures will likely
be able to return to work, it will be in a workplace that does not
recognize their fundamental right to collectively bargain. On a
more philosophical level, the sale of public goods embodies the
sale of political power – teaching is, after all, in the properly
Freirean sense, a political act – to the private sector. When
education becomes a product, it comes to embody the capitalist
ideology of its salespeople.
The future of Chicago’s vacated school buildings remains
to be seen. The omnipresence of the charter school industry – the
specter hanging over the American educational establishment –
provides the most likely, and most problematic, path forward.
The financial disaster that has struck the Chicago Public Schools
will go down in history as yet another moment at which the

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neoliberal exploitation and creation of societal and economic
shock for capital gain.
SHARDS OF A POSSIBLE UTOPIA: THE RESPONSE TO
THE CHICAGO FIRESALE
Before continuing, we must clarify a theoretical issue –
that of the Žižekian stance on the prediction of the future through
the events of the present. A critique of Žižek’s assertion of the
impossibility of reverse historicism rests on the relatively
uncontroversial ground upon which Žižek himself builds his
analysis. For, when Žižek writes that there “is a delicate balance
between reading the signs from the (hypothetical Communist)
future and maintaining the openness of that future,” he permits
the “desperate search” that he simultaneously decries as being
excessively limiting when practiced without attention to
openness. The ambivalence toward a sort of utopistic tea-leaf
reading presents an openness to use the notion of reverse
historicism much the way Žižek does for the entirety of The Year
of Dreaming Dangerously: as a means of exploring the potential
future outcomes of events, rather than imposing a universal
meaning upon a given occurrence16.
Perhaps the most iconic image coming from the response
to the events in Chicago is that of nine-year-old Asean Johnson,
whose “impassioned”, extemporaneous oration on the subject
won the protests a temporary boost in media attention 17. The
victory, however, does not simply come from this momentary
elevation in reporting, but rather from the hope that Johnson
embodies for the future. The most central locus of hope comes
from Johnson’s stated intention:
“I wanted to be there to support my
school and for the other schools
that are closing, because really, I
think that no school should be
closing,” he told theGrio.”18
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There is no way to reasonably predict that Johnson will
hold the same attitudes at 19 or 29 that he holds at nine. But these
feelings speak to a broader reality, in that they are likely not
uncommon – Asean Johnson may speak to a generational shift on
the issue of demonstrative activism. His remark that the
demonstrations were “a team help, a team effort” provides at
least a glimmer of hope. More importantly, however, Johnson’s
use of demonstrative politics worked – the school that he
attended was removed from the list of schools to be closed 19.
The success of this act of resistance, however meager in
comparison to the scale of the problem, indicates a shift in the
balance of power. Nonviolent activism retains the power to
change the status quo, despite the dominance of a narrative that
indicates that protest politics is a dying medium.
Significant work has also been done within the worker’s
movement, specifically on the part of the Chicago Teacher’s
Union. The CTU is taking Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s endorsement
of the school closures as a well needed motivation to “change the
political landscape in the city,” a euphemistically-worded
indication of their plans to thwart the mayor’s reelection 20.
Further, the aforementioned use of the legal system to challenge
school closures indicates that the CTU is perfectly willing and
currently able to resume a multifaceted mode of attack21.
Rather than pointing to a future for the struggle
concerning the schools, though, this points to a future for the
strength and legitimacy of organized labor itself. Since the
neoliberal project began in the 1980s, a concentrated attempt to
discredit the process of collective bargaining (and, in the case of
recent legislative measures, disable unions from engaging in said
process) has left workers in a position of relative helplessness.
Thus, one should expect to see a response similar to that which
met the CTU’s 2012 strike: public outrage directed toward
educators who dare to care about their own working
conditions22. The response, in this case, is far from that. Public
opinion is decidedly against the closings, thanks in large part to
the vocal opposition of the CTU23.
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Activist responses such as those mentioned above come
together to form a coherent narrative. After years of suffering
crippling publicity attacks at the hands of the neoliberals, the
revolutionary tools of collective bargaining and demonstration
are regaining ground. These elements, read together, also point to
a distant future in which this localized regaining of ground finds
broader acceptance, eventually leading to a broadened acceptance
of the legitimate place of labor in discussions about the economy
(and, ultimately, their seizure of the means of production,
culminating in the dawn of communism). The more likely story
in the near term, of course, is that the neoliberal capitalist project
will survive the protests, and continue largely unscathed.
However, as Ĺ˝iĹžek would remind us, we must maintain the
openness of the future, and recognize the possibility of authentic,
sustainable political change.

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NOTES/REFERENCES

1 Hogan, Sarah. "Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine: Spenser's Vision of
Capitalist Imperialism." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.2 (2012):
462-86. Print. Here, Hogan is describing the early capitalist colonialist attitudes of
Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland; her remark on subjugated
peoples and lands seems appropriate for the discussion of the neoliberal (and perhaps
neoimperial) project of never-ending privatization.
2 Reuters. "Chicago School Closings: Board Set To Vote On Mass Shutdown
Plan."The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 22 May 2013. Web. 01 June 2013.
3 Bellware, Kim. "CTU, Rahm Emanuel School Closings: Union Vows Political
Shakeup -- And Mayor's Ouster."The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 23
May 2013. Web. 01 June 2013, and Erbentraut, Joseph. "Chicago School Closing
Lawsuit: Teachers Union, Parents File Third Suit Against Closures."The Huffington
Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 May 2013. Web. 01 June 2013.
4 Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York:
Metropolitan Books: 2007. Print.
5 Strauss, Valerie. "The Rev. John Thomas: No Act of God Caused Chicago Schools
Closings." The Answer Sheet By Valerie Strauss. The Washington Post, 23 May 2013.
Web. 6 June 2013.
6 Žižek, Slavoj. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso Books. 2012.
Print.
7 ibid, p.128-9.
8 Klein, op. cit. pp. 84, 410.
9 Strauss, Valerie. "The Biggest Irony in Chicago's Mass Closing of Schools." The
Answer Sheet By Valerie Strauss. The Washington Post, 30 May 2013. Web. 1 June
2013.
10 We must remain vigilant against falsehood, and always remember that, while charter
schools make the claim that they remain public through the acceptance of public funds,
their lack of accountability to the standards set for traditional public schools, and their
operation and ownership by private entities make them as private as any other school.
11 Buckley, Jack, and Mark Schneider. "Are Charter School Parents More Satisfied
With Schools? Evidence From Washington, DC." Peabody Journal of Education 81.1
(2006): 57-78. Print.
12 See Almond, Monica (2013) "The Great Migration: Charter School Satisfaction
Among African American Parents," LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and
Research from Claremont Graduate University: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 1, in which
Almond also provides advice “for traditional public school leaders to consider the

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implementation of these practices,” demonstrating that there is nothing inherent to the
supposed superiority of the charter school.
13 Miner, Zach. "Charter Schools Might Not Be Better - On Education
(usnews.com)."US News & World Report. US News, 17 June 2009. Web. 2 June 2013.
Also, Paulson, Amanda. "Study: On Average, Charter Schools Do No Better than
Public Schools."The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor, 29
June 2010. Web. 02 June 2013. The study cited by Paulson comes from the federal
government, and finds that “Middle-school students who were selected by lottery to
attend charter schools performed no better than their peers who lost out in the lottery
and attended nearby public schools[.]”
14 Paulson, ibid.
15 Reuters, ibid.
16 Žižek, op. cit., p. 128-9
17 Workneh, Lilly. "Meet Asean Johnson: 9-year-old activist fights Chicago school
closings." TheGrio. NBC News, 31 May 2013. Web. 06 June 2013.
18 Workneh, ibid.
19 Workneh, ibid.
20 Bellware, ibid.
21 Erbentraut, ibid.
22 The New York Times Editorial Board. "EDITORIAL: Chicago Teachers' Folly."
The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 Sept. 2012. Web. 06 June 2013. If the
title is any indication, the protests were certainly not well received by the institutions of
capitalism, especially not the media ideological state apparatus. Opponents to the strike
action were able to sway the conversation in their favor using students as political
pawns, never mind that the aims of the teachers in question ultimately served the
students as well.
23 Strauss, op. cit., "The Rev. John Thomas: No Act of God Caused Chicago Schools
Closings."

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BECOMING-GHOST, SPECTERS OF REVOLT: THE GHOSTS OF
GEIST AND CAPITAL

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Ph.D.

Ghosts are real and normal. What is truly “paranormal” is
their absence. 1
To understand the meaning of this proclamation, we start
by defining, or by redefining, its key terms.
I do not use the term “ghost” to specify anything
supernatural or in any celestial sense. Rather, let’s begin with the
question of what a ghost, or a specter, does. A ghost may do
many things, but its primary activity—the one which
distinguishes the ghost as a ghost—is to haunt. To be haunted is
to be troubled or followed by the presence of some invisible
thing, some unseen entity that one nonetheless feels or knows to
be present. Indeed, a ghost may haunt as an invisible presence, or
as a scarcely visible phenomenon, which affectively transforms
the context in which one lives or acts. Ghosts are typically
understood to haunt particular locations, objects, or people with
which they are associated in some intimate and historical way.
All of this is quite conventional to the common definition of
ghosts, and yet it is a language that can be used to describe the
normal—perhaps universal—experience of being haunted by
personal or political history, being haunted by the bad things we
have done or that have been done to us. On the personal level,
when we speak of one’s “baggage,” or of being troubled by a
memory, by a traumatic event, people can even name the specific
ghosts that haunt them. Of course, there are other ways of
speaking of these things, but I shall argue that none of them are
as useful as the language of ghosts for diagnostic and prescriptive
purposes.

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We do not have to go out on any shaky limbs to reclaim
the language of ghosts from its supernatural and religious captors.
Let us consider the meanings of the German word “Geist.”
Depending on context, “Geist” can be translated as the English
words “mind,” “spirit,” or “ghost.” The word Geist is
etymologically identical to the English word ghost. But for a long
time, English renderings have reduced the tripartite meaning of
the word to “spirit/mind” or “spirit (mind),” and choosing which
one to go with has a complex philosophical history dating back
(at least) to G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, or The
Phenomenology of Mind.2 Both of these are titles for the same
book that can still be found in English publication today. We
cannot finally settle the choice between one and the other title,
because understanding Hegel’s philosophy requires both
spiritual-metaphysical and rationalist connotations. Hegel’s work
depends upon a more robust conception of Geist and resists
reductive translation. In cognitive science and neuropsychology,
and in the philosophical work that centralizes these, for example
that of Daniel Dennett, spirit has fallen off entirely, because
science is more confident than ever before that everything that
was mysterious enough to be called “spiritual” can now be
demystified as some complexity or another of human brain
function.3
We must notice the tendency in philosophy and science to
strip Geist of all its ghostly meaning, whilst even phonetically,
the word “Geist” is closer to the word “ghost” than any of its
more common renderings. But there is more than a phonetic force
for ghosts left in the concept and meaning of Geist, for the ghosts
that I want to speak of are those that haunt our minds, as
individual persons and collectivities, in psychological, social, and
psycho-social senses. The tripartite meaning of the word “Geist”
already embodies the idea we shall be working out in the present
essay, because that meaning conceives the domain of the mind as
also the domain of ghosts, and the brain (or mind) is where
haunting takes hold of us. On this point, even the most
materialistic cognitive scientist would agree, such as when the
scientist debunks ghostly activity as “your mind playing tricks on
you.” We need not refute the debunking, but can go farther to say
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that every person’s mind plays tricks on them and that, in this
sense precisely, everyone has ghosts.
Recall the opening proclamation: Ghosts are real and
normal. What is “paranormal” is their absence. What is meant by
“paranormal” in this proclamation is the rather literal and
etymological sense of the word, scrubbed of its supernatural and
religious encrustations. “Paranormal” is a relatively new word, a
20th century term that designates experiences outside of the
range of normal human experience. If we consider ghosts vis-àvis Geist, in the context provided above, then we can understand
the assertion that ghosts are real and normal, and that their
absence is paranormal. There is no semantic sorcery here, for the
word-forming prefix “para” always indicates “alongside, beyond,
contrary to, irregular, or abnormal,” hence “paralegal” indicates
action beyond, outside of, or against the law, and paranormal
indicates some experience beyond, outside of, or against what is
normal.
Given this, it is fair to say that some ghosts may be
paranormal, but only in a differently qualified sense. For
example, if you are haunted by some experience from your past
that haunts scarcely anyone else, an experience that is unrelatable to others within the social context, if the ghosts that
haunt you are beyond the world of common experience, then
your ghosts are paranormal indeed, but they are not, for that
reason, celestial apparitions. Holding off, for now, specific
considerations of some one particularly un-relatable haunting or
another, we can establish the general premise that everyone is
haunted by something, that every human person with a history of
experiences in the world is haunted by some ghost(s). It is upon
this general premise that we may say, ghosts are real and normal.
If we invert the logic of fear that usually attends
discussions of ghosts, we also invert its normative underpinnings.
For example, a social system full of exploitation and human
suffering, we could say, should be haunted by the miseries it
proliferates and sanctions. Extreme wealth in the face of growing
and widespread impoverishment should be haunted, if not on
moral or ethical grounds, then by the threat of mutinies on the
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horizon. An everyday life of generalized anxiety and despair
could and should be haunted by the possibility of renewed
pleasure and joy. Sometimes a haunting is a good thing, as in the
case of a perpetrator of an awful crime being haunted by what
he’s done. Sometimes the haunting is a reassuring thing, a thing
that afflicts and worries the existing state of affairs. Political
systems are haunted by revolutions, whether from the past or
possible ones in the future, and every capitalist hierarchy is
haunted by the possibilities of insubordination. In this essay, I
argue that ghosts can be part of what disfigures and harms us, or
part of what emancipates us and transforms the world for the
better.
In what follows, I argue four specific lines in relation to
this introduction. First, I argue that every human person has
ghosts, and that these may be good or bad. Second, I argue that
ghosts haunt institutions, social and political. These ghosts
comprise an ethical conscience, a revolutionary potentiality, or
both. Third, I argue that some ghosts need to be busted, and that
ghost-busting can be a liberatory and rehabilitative praxis.
Finally, I argue that every society is haunted by its ghosts, but
that this haunting is too localized and anchored to particular
scenes of historical crimes. Often what are needed are ever more
ghosts and deterritorialized haunting. This requires a kind of
“becoming-ghost” politics according to which existing relations
of power are troubled and spooked by forces beyond—beyond
the state, outside and against it, often invisible, scarcely visible,
but which can transform the contexts in which we live.
I. HAUNTED PERSONS: YOUR/MY GHOSTS
Each of us is haunted. Class analysis may be of little help
in determining the nature of a personal haunting. The question of
what haunts a person can only be answered in highly
differentiated personal contexts. Your ghosts might remain a
private matter were it not for the fact that what haunts you colors
the nature of your relationships. Either you would have to tell us
what haunts you, or we might be able to guess after we’ve had
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some sustained and intimate relationality. Your ghosts could be
many things that haunt you. If you were betrayed by a lover you
once trusted with confidence, the possibility of betrayal might
haunt you. If you did wrong to another, the memory of the pain
you inflicted might haunt you. You might be haunted by
something that you said, something you shouldn’t have said, even
something you said by accident, which can nonetheless create a
memory that is present and recurring throughout your life. You
can be haunted in more obvious ways, by the memory of a dead
parent or friend, but these ghosts have no need for supernatural
explanations for they already make sense in a materialist
framework, in the psychological contexts of regret, longing,
sadness, or in the affirmation of life.
Almost any memory can haunt, because ghosts are
memories, but not all memories are ghosts. Prior to consideration
of the social and political dimensions of ghosts, we should
establish the basic diagnostic value of the language of ghosts
here.
Each of us has many memories, some of them readily
available, others buried beneath the detritus of more pressing
concerns at the forefront of our consciousnesses. Occasionally, to
access a memory requires some kind of provocation or stimulus,
prompting the memory to “come back to us,” as we say. Within
the multilayered field of memories, only some have the status of
ghosts. For example, much of what we remember does not haunt
us. The most banal memories of everyday life are not, each one
on their own, ghosts. But the banality of everyday life, taken as a
whole, may well be a haunting thing. The question of what
memories haunt, and what do not, depends very much upon a
person’s ghosts, and is only answerable as a highly individuated
and personal question. In the first instance, the language of ghosts
can help us to distinguish which memories haunt us and why.
It is important, however, to keep in mind that a memory is
not a simple fact. What one remembers has much to do with how
one experiences a thing. In any human relationship, whether
between siblings, friends, or lovers, certain facts are remembered
in very different ways, and memories tend to preserve particular
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transmuted realities. That is, a memory is the product of some
interpretation of some affectation, which puts us in touch with
how something seemed to us to be, or what was its significance at
that particular time in our lives. This is why, in some cases, the
memory of an apparently boring or incidental affair can haunt a
person, because the subject that it haunts remembers it in a
particular way, has given it a certain signification, and has
thereby inadvertently converted it into an active ghost.
Something must also be said about good ghosts, or
“friendly ghosts.” To speak in moral terms (although we could
just as easily make the point in other terms), we may be reassured
of a person’s good character by the fact that they are haunted by
the bad things they’ve done. Good ghosts can be antagonistic too.
As shall be argued below, it may be good and necessary to
participate in a kind of “becoming-ghost” whereby our actions
contribute to haunting the conscience(s) of others, of institutions
and their human representatives. Victims of rape, of torture, or
even victims of capital, or any other of the many real victims of
the world, can move beyond the law and all of its failings by way
of haunting their perpetrators. This haunting need not take the
form of vengeance, and it may well be an important part of what
is called justice, or a perfectly sensible indignation. In another
context, to be haunted by the reassuring memory of a lost loved
one, by the warm memory of some experience of love or
friendship, shows that certain ghosts make good company.
Each of us is haunted, and yet we cannot judge this fact as
good or bad. The goodness of a haunting depends upon the nature
of the ghosts, upon how they haunt us, upon why they haunt us,
and how the haunting changes things. The tricky thing about
ghosts is that they can be invisible, and at the same time, they can
make themselves known beyond any shadow of a doubt. Each
person comes with some ghosts, and usually, you cannot see
them right away. If a person denies having any ghosts, they are
either lying, delusional, revealing a deficit of self-understanding,
or they have not yet experienced the active haunting of their
ghosts. Any of these possibilities is more tenable than the
assertion that absolutely none of one’s memories haunts. The
total absence of conscious reflection and conscientious
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consideration may minimize our awareness of ghosts and might
eliminate the effects of being haunted, but thoughtful people, and
I would say most people, aren’t spared so easily. Ghosts are a
feature of the apparatus of thinking, and thinking people have
them. If such assertions seem overly categorical, they should not.
It is worth recalling that these assertions merely affirm the
etymological and conceptual imbrications of Geist with both
mind (the mind thinks) and ghost (ghosts haunt).
Some of a person’s ghosts are not a problem and never
will be. Some ghosts are welcome to stay. Other ghosts should be
gotten rid of for they stand in the way of our desires and obstruct
our being-in-the-world until they are “exorcized,” until they are
busted. But the fact is that a great many of the ghosts we’d like to
bust will haunt us forever.
II. HAUNTED COMMONS: OUR GHOSTS
Everywhere in the world, people are haunted. Ghosts are
not the private property of the cultural imaginary of just some
people somewhere. There are, to be sure, many differences across
cultures in discourses on ghosts, but it is more to our present
purposes to consider commonalities. Ghosts are typically “found”
in places where horrible things have happened to people, things
not easily reconciled with the good consciences of people. We
can highlight at least three tendencies: 4 (a) the ghosts of the
despised, locked-up, and vilified, (b) the ghosts of exploitation,
and (c) the ghosts of power and war. These tendencies often
overlap. For example, despised and vilified people are often the
most exploited, and war typically requires despising or vilifying
the “enemy.” In what follows, I shall touch upon some of the
ghosts that haunt in common ways around the world.
The overarching aim of the present discussion is to
articulate an understanding of our ghosts, that is, haunting on the
level of collectivity. Quite obviously, I make no mention of most
of the haunting of the world. There are uncountable purportedly
haunted sites related to freak accidents, suicides, rapes, hangings,
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drowning, fires, murdered and dead celebrities, and tragic lost
lovers. I gloss over such locations to draw special attention to
some of the more institutional and social memories that haunt.
(a) Throughout history, institutions have been built to
incarcerate the manifold of despised and misunderstood peoples,
including prisoners, slaves, and all those deemed “mad” or
“dangerous.” Throughout history and still to this day, massive
subsets of the human population are removed from the public and
locked up in various spaces of privation from the world. There is
a common tendency to later find ghosts wherever the despised,
the criminals, and psychological misfits have been
institutionalized and mistreated. Alas, one of the many problems
of morality is that it often arrives on the scene too late.
In Australia, the Ararat Lunatic Asylum was opened in
1867, where an estimated 13,000 people died. Also in Australia is
the purportedly haunted Beechworth Lunatic Asylum. It is not so
much that we are haunted by the “lunatics” themselves, but
rather, by what happened in the places where we kept them, by
what happened to them. In Indonesia, ghost sightings have been
reported in the basement of a building called Lawang Sewu,
formerly a prison. In Ireland, ghost tourists can visit Leap Castle,
where so many were imprisoned and executed. In the U.S., the
list of sites haunted by the ghosts of the despised is too numerous
to account for here, since every state is full of such locations,
including many prisons and slave haunts. In Louisiana, for
example, the former Magnolia Plantation is reportedly haunted
by slaves. The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville is reportedly
haunted by the ghost of a slave known as Chloe.
Even where the ghosts of the despised, enslaved, and
abused do the haunting directly, these are typically the ghosts of
those who have died from maltreatment, abandonment, egregious
disregard. In this way, the ghosts of the despised are part of a
reckoning with a history of institutional—and institutionalized—
violence. The ghost tours in the slave haunts of the French
Quarter in New Orleans, as in many other locations, convey this
sense of historical reckoning. It would be reasonable to expect
that other despised people, such as gays and lesbians who have
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been “bashed,” detained, killed, “suicided,” and sent to
“heterosexualizing” programs will produce a new wave of ghosts.
Indeed, inasmuch as societies have already become consciously
haunted by their historical treatment of gays and lesbians, the
becoming-ghost of despised sexualities is well underway. Would
any reader be surprised to learn that, in the future, a shuttered
Guantanamo Bay “Detention Camp” may be reportedly haunted
too? Haunting such as this even begins as something rather tepid,
like the good conscience of a liberal.
(b) A second tendency is to find ghosts wherever workers
have been fatally exploited, expropriated, or abused, in the
process of constructing some grand fortress or bourgeois
monument, some site to be haunted later on by the very ones who
built it. This tendency, as you might expect, often overlaps with
the first one, for it specifies haunting by the abused. But in this
category, we don’t have the refrain of lunacy to confuse us about
whether the haunting comes from the people who we feared or
what has been done to them. In other words, the ghosts of
exploitation come from the maltreatment of everyday people,
“regular people” who we could relate to without much difficulty
of imagination.
Back again to Australia, there is Brisbane City Hall.
There, stories of deaths spanning the time period of the
construction of the building feed into stories about the ghosts that
haunt it. During construction, many workers are said to have died
while placing the foundations. Beyond this, there is haunting
associated with the fact that Brisbane City Hall is purportedly
built on top of a sacred aboriginal site, either a meeting place or a
camp ground. In China, there are stories of the ghosts of the
exploited workers who died constructing the Great Wall.
Throughout the world, similar stories accompany massive
undertakings, such as railroads that depend on the total
exploitation and exhaustion of human energies. In the Brisbane
example, with the aboriginal dimension of the story, we can pick
up another common thread: Indigenous peoples around the world
are often said to haunt their former places of being-in-the-world,
places from which they were almost always forcibly expropriated
by the interests of capital and foreign powers.
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Within this tendency of haunting, we find a certain
resistance to erasure. The ghosts of exploitation remind us that
there were bodies and brains there before, and that people
suffered and died to leave us some monument of human
undertaking. The building or construction site (or its human
representatives) might wish to erase the memory of those who
died to build it, of those who were expropriated from the
geographic space it rests on, yet the ghosts stand in the way of
such erasure. The ghosts remind us of what would be erased, or
of what was “erased” in some fatal episode of violence, but the
persistence of active haunting prevents the total erasure of that
history. The tendency of such haunting, observable in purported
haunts around the world, further explains why ghosts are often
thought to be anchored to specific architectural structures.
Whereas the first tendency largely regards the unconscionable
things that have happened within physical spaces and buildings,
this second tendency regards the unconscionable things that have
happened before buildings or constructs, the exploitation and
expropriation that made them possible, or more simply, their
foundational violence.
(c) The third tendency, like the first two, often overlaps
with them. Throughout the world, it is quite common to find
ghosts wherever official political power has been deployed to
torture and kill by way of militarism, imperialism, or war in
general. These are things (i.e., militarism, imperialism, war) that
nation-states do with great efficiency, even if we recognize that
states are instruments in the service of capital. Historically,
certain forms of violence (the worst forms) have been
monopolized by official institutions of governance, and have not
been available to everyday people.
In China, we could visit the so-called “Forbidden City,”
located in Beijing, and home to the Palace Museum. For 600
years, from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty, the
Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace. The Forbidden
City was the home of the imperial family, complete with a
massive store of “concubines” and “servants.” Thousands lived
and died there as human fodder for the pleasures of dynastic
regimes. It is no wonder that visitors and workers have long
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claimed to see ghosts there. In France, at Château de Versailles,
home to the royal family from 1682 and 1789, there have been
reports of sightings of the ghost of a beheaded Marie Antoinette.
In Germany, it is hardly surprising that the Reichstag building in
Berlin has been reported haunted and, in Heidelberg, the
Hexenturm Witches Tower and the Nazi Amphitheatre are said to
be haunted. In Malaysia, the Victoria Institution is said to be
haunted, a school in Kuala Lumpur that was turned into a torture
chamber for prisoners of war and civilians by the Japanese during
World War II. In England, airfields around the country are
claimed to be haunted by the ghosts of airmen who died fighting
in World War II. In Russia, the Kremlin is said to be haunted by
Lenin and Stalin, although it is possible to say that all of us
(including communists) are haunted by them.
The main thing to distinguish in this category of haunting
is that political power, militarism, and imperialism have been the
causes of so much carnage throughout human history that they
cannot but leave a legacy of ghost activity along with the corpses.
Of the three tendencies discussed above, the ghosts of power and
war are the most deterritorialized. That is, these ghosts are
attached to human eventuality more than to architecture, physical
structures, or national boundaries. In a certain sense, the ghosts of
power and war have long forecasted the definition of empire
made famous by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: “In contrast
to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power
and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a
decentered and deterritorializing apparatus…”5 Indeed, the
ghosts of war, as accessories of empire, cannot but travel the
world beyond fixed boundaries or barriers to follow the trauma of
every military invasion.
In fact, to better highlight the literal and materialist
discourse on ghosts in the context of the ghosts of war, we should
consider the recent crisis in the U.S. of soldiers returning from
Iraq and Afghanistan with dangerous and widespread outbreaks
of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Of course, long
before this crisis of PTSD, it was on the level of common sense
that war is traumatic. But now, the epidemic crisis of PTSD

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haunts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in concrete and impactful
ways.
The ghosts discussed in this section may be considered
real and unreal, depending on what exactly one means by ghost.
Using the definition provided in the present essay, all of these
ghosts are real. Simply put, that generations of people have been
and continue to be haunted by the awful things that people do
cannot be gainsaid. Such ghosts are a part of historical
understanding, of moral reckoning, or of what is called justice.
The abovementioned ghosts can only be condemned as unreal in
the sense that would specify celestial apparitions, although just as
it is with God, we can never really prove the non-existence of
those ghosts to everyone’s satisfaction.
In the present text, my opposition to the celestial form of
ghosts as metaphysical apparitions is more political than
phenomenological. We mustn’t only confront the metaphysical
ghosts that are attached to something outside of ourselves. Such
ghosts are too easily seen as external to us, and even the assertion
of their existence relieves us of the burden of having to confront
some collective memory and historical self-understanding. But
we should go farther. Indeed, my sense of the ghost is far less
questionable than the more operational and widespread sense that
identifies every haunting with some celestial apparition. Every
day, people deny celestial apparitions and they can always find
an easy way to do so, but not so with the PTSD that accompanies
war. Post-war PTSD can be established as certain a fact as any.
It is no coincidence or surprise that the ghosts of the
despised, the ghosts of the exploited, and the ghosts of war haunt
the world. The question is: What to do with our ghosts?
III. GHOST-BUSTING
Ghost-busting refers to any process that brings a haunting
to its end, any process that lays an active ghost to rest, such that
the person or place is no longer haunted by it. In many of the
examples I’ve described, it is actually good news to be haunted
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by ghosts. Not all ghosts should be busted. While, on the one
hand, we might wish for a victim of abuse to bust the ghosts that
haunt her, on the other hand, we might wish for the haunting of
her perpetrator.
But some ghosts should be busted.
In political, cultural, and psychological contexts, certain
ghosts keep us from participation; certain ghosts stymie feelings
of solidarity, alienate and depress us, both individually and
collectively. Although she does not rely in any way on the
language of ghosts, Julia Kristeva has done much to help us
understand the nature of the ghosts I seek to discuss and the
ghost-busting that should and could be done here.
Kristeva wants to diagnose what haunts a culture of
revolt, or more specifically, what keeps us from revolting.
“Stalinism no doubt marked the strangling of the culture of
revolt, its deviation into terror and bureaucracy. Can one
recapture the spirit itself and extricate new forms from it beyond
the two impasses where we are caught today: the failure of
rebellious ideologies, on the one hand, and the surge of consumer
culture, on the other?”6 Kristeva then asserts that “[t]here is an
urgent need to develop the culture of revolt starting with our
aesthetic heritage and to find new variants of it.”7
We should note that when Kristeva uses the term “revolt,”
she does not mean the politically specific sense of a civil society
in revolt against its government (although her sense of revolt
does include that more common, narrower meaning). Kristeva
begins with the etymological and conceptual richness of the word
and idea “revolt” from the Latin verbs volvere and revolvere,
which indicate consultation, rereading, return, and repair, among
other meanings. Revolt has both individual and collective
meanings, and as a psychoanalyst, Kristeva explores what she
calls “psychic revolt” (discussed more fully below). What
Kristeva calls psychic revolt requires, using the language of the
present work, a confrontation with ghosts.
The relationship between the notion of a haunting ghost
and the notion of analysis appears for us in Kristeva’s description
of Freud’s problematic as “a remembrance and representation of
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the initial murder.”8 In Freudian psychoanalysis, analysis is used
to go back to scenes of the crime to which a person’s ghosts can
be traced. An analyst begins by trying to understand the nature of
the ghosts that haunt the person being analyzed, and the process
of analysis attempts to return to, uncover, consult, reread, and
ultimately repair, the damage that was done some time ago.
Considering the exploratory and revelatory dimensions of
analysis, and the etymological and conceptual meanings of
“revolt,” we begin to understand how and why ghost-busting
might require a form of psychic revolt. Thinking about revolt in a
psychoanalytic context, Kristeva proposes three forms of
analytical or psychic revolt: “revolt as the transgression of a
prohibition; revolt as repetition, working-through, working-out;
and revolt as displacement, combinatives, games.”9
So, as we have been saying, every person has ghosts,
some of which should be busted, and analysis provides certain
ways of thinking about how to do that. Utilizing Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic theory, one way to ghost-bust may be to confront
and transgress rules, including expectations for behavior and
aspirations. If you are haunted by the rules, and you do not want
to be, then break the rules. Another way to ghost-bust may be to
confront and think about the nature of one’s own ghosts, going
over again and again their origins, their raison d’être, and
working through or working out the issues that have left one so
haunted. Finally, displacement, combinatives, and games, brings
us to Kristeva’s interest in aesthetics and new variants of creative
artistic praxis. This last form involves experimentation in modes
of play and expression. Revolt always involves acts of
questioning, and Kristeva says that such a questioning “is also
present in artistic experience, in the rejection and renewal of old
codes of representation staged in painting, music, or poetry.”10
None of these figures of revolt precludes the other, and most
likely, a good healthy revolt would employ some combination of
two or three of the above.
We do not simply rename Kristeva’s “psychic revolt” as
our “ghost-busting.” We wouldn’t want to, for the limits of
psychoanalysis leave out too much. There may be other ways to
bust ghosts than through the various pathways of analysis that
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Kristeva outlines. Some ghosts can be outgrown, forgotten,
busted by love, or replaced by new ones without any warning. No
science or discipline has it all figured out. It’s not easy to bust the
ghosts that haunt in ways that paralyze us with fear, anxiety, and
that cut us off from others and from the possibility for a culture
of revolt. But inasmuch as we are talking about busting the ghosts
of Geist, the ghosts of the human mind, Kristeva’s analytical
revolt is well calibrated to the task.
Especially useful in the resources of Kristeva is her
rejection of the dichotomy between the individual and collective
crisis. The crisis of the individual is directly and causally related
to the crisis of the collectivity, and vice versa, so working
through problems by way of revolt is a necessarily multifarious
process of individual and collective action, and never one without
the other.
All of this is clear in Kristeva’s numerous volumes on
revolt,11 and is sharply articulated in Revolt, She Said: “First of
all, this incapacity to rebel is the sign of national depression.
Faltering images of identity (when they’re not lacking altogether)
and lost confidence in common cause, give rise at the national
level to just what the depressed individual feels in his isolation:
namely, feeling cut off from the other person (your nearest and
dearest, neighbors, politics) and from communication, inertia,
your desire switched off. On the other hand, people who rebel are
malcontents with frustrated, but vigorous desires.”12
But how can we make the more resolutely political side of
ghost-busting appear? What we can say, with the help of
Kristeva’s psychoanalytic social theory, is that individual people
and collectivities are often haunted into isolated and depoliticized
states of acquiescence and hopelessness by personal and political
ghosts. And, increasing precariousness and privatization around
the world have only consolidated the problem. People are
haunted by their pasts, as well as by their uncertain futures. We
have no security in the present, and no certain future, which
largely explains the widespread resonance of the term “precariat”
throughout Europe in the early part of the millennium. Following
Kristeva, we could say that a person who wants to bust her ghosts
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can engage in psychic or analytical revolt, whereas society needs
a culture of revolt in order to remain in a state of healthy
questioning, renewal, and renovation. It is within this context that
I propose revolt as a form of ghost-busting. By way of revolt, the
ghosts that haunt can be confronted and busted.
But there is another side to the story: Sometimes, what is
needed is to become the ghosts ourselves, to become the ones
who haunt.
IV. BECOMING-GHOST, SPECTERS OF REVOLT
Communism is one of the most notorious ghosts, one that
has haunted the world since the 19th century. Communists and
anti-communists alike have been happy to accept that claim,
albeit from opposing points of view. Karl Marx, the great
materialist himself, makes numerous mentions and uses of the
language of ghosts, as well as of sorcery. In perhaps the most
well-known line, The Communist Manifesto begins: “A specter is
haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of
old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals
and German police-spies.”13
Marx’s normative assessment of the communist haunting
was complicated. On the one hand, much of the fear of
communism was (and still is) the result of slander and ideological
misrepresentation, much of which Marx and Engels sought to
refute in the The Communist Manifesto. But, on the other hand,
the specter of communism is admittedly something that should
haunt and frighten the existing capitalist world, or what Marx and
Engels called “bourgeois society.” 14 The complexity of these two
sides can only be grasped when we understand that the ideal
starting position of communism would be for the specter of
communism to actively haunt the world. That is to say, if
communism really threatens to abolish or transform the existing
world, then this world must be haunted by communism. Today,
the specter of communism continues to haunt, but in other
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locations than those Marx imagined in Europe in 1848. Today,
the specter of communism actively haunts in the Middle Eastern
and North African (MENA) states, in Turkey, in India, in China,
in Spain, and throughout Latin America. “Communism” also
haunts, in especially ideological forms, in the U.S. and the U.K.
(I use “communism” in quotes to specify an idea of communism
that is not recognizably communist to serious inquiry, but that
has been commonly deployed as a vilification that derives its
force from Cold War discourses.) I discuss the distinctions
between communism and “communism” at greater length
elsewhere.15 For now, suffice it to say that both communism and
“communism,” that is, both what it means and its spectacle (i.e.,
the vilified form)—retain their old power to haunt the world.
The central argument advanced here is that the structure
of human relationality that organizes the actually existing world
today—a world governed by the logic of capital—should be
haunted by its past, present, and future. Let’s make mention of a
particular instance, from which readers can imagine other
historical and possible examples.
The uprisings that erupted in Turkey in May and June
2013 constitute a certain modality of haunting. Also, since late
2010, regimes across numerous MENA countries south of the
Mediterranean Sea have been haunted by the so-called “Arab
Spring.” Even where civil societies were not in revolt, the spirit
of uprising that appeared to come from Tunisia was understood
as a shape-shifting phenomenon that could travel across
boundaries, with different nodal points in different locations. We
could perhaps speak of a ghost of Mohamed Bouazizi, or at least,
a mobile Gemeingeist that could grow and animate subsets of
populations in revolt.
From outside in the West, and from many on the inside,
Turkey has come to be seen as a positive example of the power of
capital and neoliberalism to “develop” a region in “good”
directions. The uprising was triggered in part by contestation over
the future of green public space in Istanbul, beginning with a sitin in Gezi Park on Taksim Square, where fewer than 100
protesters gathered on May 27, 2013. The gatherings quickly
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grew into fierce nationwide opposition to Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan’s ten-year rule and provided an open space for
the expression of society’s disaffection about the country’s
political, economic, and social crises. Erdogan immediately
forgot his publicly stated position during the uprisings in Egypt
and Syria, when he demanded that Mubarak and Assad yield to
their people and step down. When Erdogan became the target,
that old advice became inapplicable, as he denounced his
opponents as “vandals” and “terrorists.”
Given the differences between Syria and Egypt, on the
one hand, and Turkey, on the other, Erdogan mistakenly took for
granted the “fixity” of the spirit of revolt in neighboring and
nearby countries. But ghosts can travel. They do not stay put as
obediently as powerholders might wish.
The uprisings in Turkey—like those before in the socalled “Arab Spring”—have to do with problems that also occur
elsewhere, so the tendency to describe them as “Egyptian,”
“Turkish,” or even as “Arab,” reduces and misunderstands the
phenomena in dangerous ways. We are in fact looking at
confrontations with rather general (or generalizable) problems of
the existing world, a world that has been governed by the global
logic of capital, a world that people everywhere want to throw
into question.
In Turkey, the revolt articulates a number of widely
applicable grievances clearly and directly. Consider one of them:
The opposition in Istanbul, in Gezi Park and Taksim Square, to
building a shopping mall was opposition in defense of the open
green space that the mall would be built upon. The uprising
sprang from the peoples’ defense of the common’s space (public)
against capital’s space (private). Erdogan understood this
objection well, which is why he insisted that the shopping mall
would not be “a traditional mall,” for it would include cultural
centers, an opera house, and a mosque. 16 In the original plans, an
Ottoman-era military barracks would be rebuilt near the site and
the historic Ataturk Cultural Center would be demolished.
Kalyon Group, a company with ties to the Erdogan government,
was contracted to carry out the project. The whole idea embodies
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and reflects with perfect accuracy one of the most malignant lies
of neoliberalism: Namely, that privatization and the logic of
capital do no harm to culture, to the natural world, or to public
space. If the shopping mall is built, it will be haunted by the
uprising of the summer of 2013, and it will continue to be a site,
indeed a target, for future haunting.
Ghosts are not only a shadowy lurking that follows the
failure or death of some personal or collective being. Ghosts can
be active, they can intervene in the world and change things, and
often, the problem with the world is not that it is too haunted, but
that it is not haunted enough.
There is, after all, something rather absurd (and
suspiciously convenient) about the ghost-tour-notion of haunted
sites, according to which ghosts are anchored to fixed locations
where we can leave them locked in buildings we might pay to
visit for an hour’s entertainment. Moreover, there is something
regrettable about the reduction of ghosts to dastardly villains
instead of transformative forces, or figments of the consciences
of the world. If a global social system increasingly reorganizes
human relations according to exchange relations, and that social
system is not haunted, then it should be. If space, time, and
culture, are increasingly subordinated to the logic of capital, then
those disaffected by such subordination—the casualties—should
actively haunt the system. It is in this context, although not in this
context alone, that I recommend “becoming-ghost.”
To develop this recommendation, we shall draw upon
Félix Guattari’s conception of “becoming-woman.”17 Guattari
writes:
“On the level of the social body,
libido is caught in two systems of
opposition: class and sex. It is
expected to be male, phallocratic, it
is expected to dichotomize all
values
–
the
oppositions
strong/weak,
rich/poor,
useful/useless, clean/dirty,
etc
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Conversely, on the level of the
sexed body, libido is engaged in
becoming-woman. More precisely,
the becoming-woman serves as a
point of reference, and eventually
as a screen for other types of
becoming…”18
What does this mean? In a social context, which includes
behavioral expectations and human aspirations, as well as
interpersonal relations, we can make class- and sex-based
analyses, for example, in the classical Marxist mode of “class
analysis” or in the orientations of those feminisms that look
primarily at the social positions of women. Within the context of
class- and sex-based analyses, critical theory (including many
Marxisms and feminisms) works with certain dichotomies, i.e.,
you belong to one class or another, one gender or another. But the
concept of “becoming” undermines the fixity of class- and sexbased analyses, and specifically, becoming-woman means that
we can become more or less “feminine” or “woman-like” as an
act of subversion against the sexed dichotomy. It must be stressed
that Guattari was always fascinated with the politics of
subversion.
Guattari’s concept of becoming-woman clearly
foregrounds some of the radical directions of queer theory and
transgender politics today, and becoming-woman is a term that
can have multiple literal and figurative meanings. Perhaps the
most obvious literal meaning of becoming-woman can be seen in
transgender movements, instances of anatomically “male”
persons becoming “female.” But to be clear, such a becoming as
this, as much as it troubles conventional tendencies within second
wave feminism, is not at all the form of becoming Guattari
intends. Notice that becoming-woman in the physical and literal
sense above operates within rather than against the very
dichotomy that Guattari wants to throw into question by way of
becoming-woman. Such a physical and literal becoming-woman
remains trapped by one or another form of sexed becoming.

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Becoming, in Guattari’s sense, can move between and beyond the
conventional dichotomies of social analysis, which means that
there are many ways to subvert the phallocratic order of the
world. Becoming is about subversive forms of life—ways of
being-in-the-world, and becoming-woman is only one particular
subversive modality. This is why Guattari speaks also of
“becoming-child in Schumann, becoming-animal in Kafka,
becoming-vegetable in Novalis, becoming-mineral in Beckett.” 19
He utilizes the concept of becoming-woman for the purposes of
criticizing reactions to what is both seen to be and actually
subversive in homosexuality.
Guattari insists on this overarching point: “In a more
general way, every ‘dissident’ organization of libido must
therefore be linked to a becoming-feminine body, as an escape
route from the repressive socius, as a possible access to a
‘minimum’ of sexed becoming, and as the last buoy vis-à-vis the
established order.”20 A politics of subversive becoming makes us
slippery, makes it difficult to establish people with fixed
identities, and thus makes it difficult to hold people down or to
lock them out on the grounds of who they are. A politics of
subversive becoming is not easy, it is fraught with difficulties and
material limitations, but for Guattari, becoming is an
emancipatory project, and emancipation is never easy.
Also, Guattari does not want us to faithfully preserve and
defend his conception of becoming-woman, for it is only one
possible nodal point of becoming, for being-in-the-world. He
says that “it’s important to destroy ‘big’ notions like woman,
homosexual… Things are never that simple. When they’re
reduced to black-white, male-female categories, there’s an
ulterior motive, a binary-reductionist operation meant to
subjugate them.”21 Hence, even if we would become-woman in
any certain way, we would need another becoming still, possible
and desirable, in order to keep new emancipatory horizons open.
Following this, to speak of becoming-ghost is a perfectly
fitting turn. We know the usual story that death makes ghosts, but
we also know, in the case of authors with posthumous influence,
that there is a very real sense of life after death there. We can
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Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

speak of the life of ideas and arguments, we can even write the
histories of their fortunes and failures.
Like with Guattari’s sense of becoming-woman, we too
are not after a specific literal form of becoming-ghost, a
becoming from which we can never return or move into any other
state. Becoming-ghost means that, yes, we are haunted by some
ghosts, but we can haunt too, and we can become-ghosts in
subversive ways. We regard becoming-ghost in the context of
possible subversions and emancipations, just as Guattari intended
with becoming-woman.
What, then, are the subversive and emancipatory forms of
becoming-ghost?
In the first place, there is something subversive about the
discourse on ghosts presented here. On the discursive level, what
is subverted is the metaphysical, celestial, and religious
ownership of ghosts. We reclaim the language from a proprietary
regime, and in our hands, it helps us to speak of human
experience in new ways. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has done
something similarly subversive with the language of the soul.22
But, a more hopeful subversive aspiration is that, by way
of becoming-ghost, more of what should be haunted will be
haunted. Erdogan is haunted by his advice to Mubarak and
Assad, and uprisings in other countries—such as the revolt in
Brazil that took the world by surprise on June 17, 2013—will go
on to haunt regimes elsewhere. If Erdogan could be taken by
surprise in a neoliberal beacon like Turkey, if the most massive
uprisings in two decades in Brazil can erupt overnight, then it is
not out of the question that regimes in countries like the U.S. and
U.K. might be similarly surprised. Uprisings do not come from
nowhere; they are manifestations of haunted regimes and, like
people, all regimes have ghosts. Becoming-ghost is a movement
toward active haunting, a movement of ghosts making
themselves known.
The ghosts in Turkey and Brazil were there before the
latest active haunting of their social systems, just like the
disaffected indigenous populations in the mountains of Chiapas,
Mexico were living in oblivion long before the Zapatista
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rebellion of 1994. The Zapatistas needed to make the people of
Mexico see what was previously invisible. And Mubarak’s
regime was haunted by Egyptian civil society for nearly thirty
years before the regime was frightened into retreat. There are
many examples of haunted systems with ghosts that needed to
haunt more actively. The global effect of this activity depends
upon the proliferation of deterritorialized haunting, that is, of a
becoming-ghost that travels across borders and takes hold of
people in unexpected ways, places, and times.
There may be a temptation to say that, in the cases I’ve
mentioned, ghosts become flesh, to say that in instances of
presence and visibility the disaffected cease to be ghosts. But that
would miss the point. We must always remember what ghosts do.
They are defined by their activity, and what they do is haunt.
Haunting is subversive in an immediately understandable way:
To haunt is to unsettle what is settled, to disrupt the semblance
that there is nothing here to see. An active haunting shakes us and
wakes us, making us see something that we didn’t (or couldn’t)
see before. Often, an active haunting scares us, but if it is
convincing, it also makes us explore, look for what is really
happening, look for explanations that make sense, and reject the
world as it appears on the face of it. That is what a haunting does.
There is nothing new in this definition. Haunted people and
places are, even on the most conventional view, unsettled people
and places. Too much is too settled. Becoming-ghost is a way to
unsettle things.
Emancipation is the more difficult issue; less can be said
about it, and infinitely more than could be said here. This is
because the question of emancipation must always be qualified
with “from what” or “to what” and the nature of any real
emancipation is that we only understand it when we see it.
Nonetheless, some very general things can be said about the
emancipatory dimension of becoming-ghost.
Emancipation requires some kind of transformation in
forms of life, in being-in-the-world. Therefore, emancipation
implies becoming. There can be no emancipation without some
process of becoming, without something becoming something
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else. But why becoming-ghost? The answer to this question is
already indicated in the common logic of haunting. Ghost hunters
typically engage in one form or another of ghost-busting, and to
deal with the ghosts, they say that the ghosts will continue to
haunt until, X, Y, or Z is done. Typically, ghosts will haunt until
there is some kind of reconciliation with the past, some kind of
reckoning, some kind of justice, as it were. In the supernatural
world of ghosts, it is often said that the spirit of some being must
be set free to put an end to the haunting. Another way to put it is
to say that the haunting only ends in liberation—the liberation of
the spirit, which is to say Geist, the mind, ghosts.
Can the existing world rid itself of its ghosts without
becoming something else? That is the question. Is ghost-busting
merely a matter of policy? Will the ghosts of the economic crisis
stop haunting with the implementation of austerity measures, or
with their defeat? Even without austerity, even before the latest
crisis, things have been getting worse for precarious people
everywhere: there is more inequality, less opportunity, more
disaffection, less security, no certain futures, not even in the
stock market. Some systems are haunted without even knowing
it. We should haunt them more actively, making them afraid,
sharing our precariousness with them to make their own futures
uncertain. There is a necessarily revolutionary—or
transformative—imperative at work in all of this, which can be
expressed as the conclusion: The existing world cannot rid itself
of its ghosts without becoming something else.

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NOTES/REFERENCES
1 I would like to thank the students in my spring 2013 class, “Postmodern Theory:
Politics and Possibility,” at University of Illinois, Springfield. The idea for this article
first emerged in discussion with them, on a beautiful spring evening, during our final
session outside by the university library. It was the students who pressed me to
articulate a materialist conception of ghosts, and to realize that there was something to
be done here. I hope those who were there on that night will find this piece, and will
find something useful in the directions I have taken.
2 Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1977); Hegel,
G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind (Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003).
3 Dennett, Daniel C., Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books, 1991).
4 The three tendencies discussed here are not the only possible tendencies we could
discuss that would reveal cross-cultural commonalities in discourses on ghosts.
5 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xii.
6 Kristeva, Julia, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 7.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 15.
9 Ibid., p. 16.
10 Kristeva, Julia, Revolt, She Said, (Semiotext(e), 2002), p. 121.
11 In addition to the two texts cited here, Kristeva has a third book relevant to this
subject that I shall only mention: Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2002).
12 Kristeva, op. cit., pp. 83-84.
13 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, The Communist Manifesto (International
Publishers, 1994), p. 8.
14 Ibid., p. 9.
15 Gilman-Opalsky, Richard, Manifest(o) Mutations: Communist Détournement of
“Communism” (Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2014).
16 7 June 2013, Turkey Clashes: Why are Gezi Park and Taksim Square so Important?,
BBC News, cited at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22753752, accessed
6/21/2013.
17 The use of Guattari here should extinguish any false impression, possibly given by
Section III of this essay, that we are making a Freudian analysis of ghosts. We must
simply allow ourselves to make use of diverse and contradictory resources.
18 Guattari, Félix, “Becoming-Woman” in Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e)
Reader (Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 356.
19 Ibid.

Typically, ideology is defined as a “body of ideas
reflecting a certain individual, group, class or culture.” This being
said, the number of ideologies is limitless, and their production
incessant. However, to develop a scientific theory of ideology, it
must be understood by its general role in society, which means a
general analysis of ideology as it exists within its corresponding
social and material context must be accomplished. Rather than a
“body of ideas,” philosopher Louis Althusser defined ideology by
noting that it “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals
to their real conditions of existence.” For example, liberalism
claims to be the embodiment of liberty, justice, and equality.
However, in practice, it gives rise it its own antitheses. The
reverence liberalism grants to the institution of private property
allows for global exploitation, socio-economic stratification, etc.
In a bigger context, the role of ideology is the part it plays in the
reproduction of day-to-day life i.e, it provides the “glue” which
binds the individual to dominant social practices.
THE HISTORY OF IDEOLOGY
'Ideology’ was coined in 1796 by the French philosopher
Destutt De Tracy, who assigned ideology as the object of a
general “science of ideas.” However, the dominant and modern
understanding of the word is derived from the term’s usage by
Napoleon Bonaparte to castigate the “ideologues,” a group which
included Tracy, who were his political opponents. (Hart)
Eventually, ideology began to transform from a pejorative into a
word which was neutrally employed in the analysis of political
sciences and philosophy.
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Decades after Tracy and Napoleon’s usage of ideology,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels employed the term in a very
different manner. At that time, viewing it in a social context,
Marx and Engels would define ideology as a system of
representations which have a tendency to reflect the prevailing
socio-economic order. However, subsequent philosophers would
come to the conclusion that this definition was not sufficient. In
The German Ideology, Marx and Engels conceive ideology as the
residue left from day-to-day practices where all reality is external
to ideology i.e., “[i]deology is thus thought as an imaginary
construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of
the dream among writers before Freud.” (Althusser) However,
Althusser audaciously claims that although Marx’s formulation is
a theory of ideology, it does not offer us an authentic Marxist
theory of ideology. It ignores the material existence of ideology, a
fundamental flaw which seems to contradict Marx’s materialism.
Althusser puts forward a definition which conceives of ideology
as being “the imaginary relation of [man] to the real relations in
which they live.” (Althusser) This change, which may seem
simple, has far reaching implications in the social sciences and
philosophy.
THE BIRTH OF IDEOLOGIES
Before we can ask how “the imaginary relation of [man]
to the real relations in which they live,” translates into this
aforementioned ‘social glue,’ we must ask, how do ideologies
come about? First, it is important to differentiate between
ideology and ideologies. Ideology is the general concept we are
exploring, whereas ideologies are various, specific expressions of
ideology.
In the materialist tradition, Marx and Engels maintained
that any individual ideology (i.e, a specific expression of
ideology) was born out of the reflection of objective material
conditions on man’s consciousness and that, as Marx said, “[t]he
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Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships, the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas.” By studying history and
abstracting these relationships and their individual components, it
can be seen how material and ideological development is
realized, and how they relate. At a certain stage of development
in various epochs, the way in which people relate to the
production of their own existence “come[s] into conflict with the
existing relations of production.” (Marx) For example, we can
look at history’s most recent socio-economic development.
During feudalism’s slow transition to capitalism, the dominating
ideas of the time — such as Monarchism — became barriers to
the further development of the capitalist productive forces. New
socio-political relations had to be actualized before the
productive forces could make any qualitative leap. A philosophy
which reflected the emerging (capitalist) mode of production
would need to take root (classical liberalism). The antiMonarchic revolutions which became abundant in the 18th and
19th centuries gave capitalism the very basis it needed to flourish
by establishing a socio-political system which based on
liberalism, i.e., the natural rights of life, liberty, and most
importantly private property. Thus, it can be seen how liberalism
— a specific expression of ideology — was born out of the
material conditions which necessitated its existence.
THE HEGEMONY AND FUNCTION OF IDEOLOGY
Now to further define and understand ideology, Althusser
introduced the concept of “ideological state apparatuses,” or
“ISA’s” which function to maintain ideological hegemony. These
apparatuses are seen as “a certain number of realities, which
present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of
distinct and specialized institutions.” (Althusser) Such
institutions can be separated into distinct apparatuses, with
varying magnitudes of autonomy and influence: the religious ISA
(church systems), the educational ISA (public and private school
systems), the family ISA, the political ISA (political parties,
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Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

political system), the legal ISA, etc. These institutions all
function in a similar manner: by ideology. This means that what
unites them, even in their diversity, is that they all function
subordinated to what is fundamentally the same ideology.
In the United States, for example, legal, political, familial,
and educational systems all function by their accordance with the
dominant system of ideology, namely capitalist democraticrepublicanism. That isn’t to say somewhere, in small amounts,
some “members” of such institutions do not exist that challenge
the dominate ideology, but that their existence is meaningless
insofar as they exist in minuscule numbers. Ideology presents
itself everywhere, from popular culture to politics. Michel
Foucault went so far as to define ideology as a discourse: “Each
society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that
is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as
true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to
distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is
sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the
acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with
saying what counts as true.” Thus ideology, or in this case,
“discourse” functions to unconsciously “control” society to
enable its functioning. Never has a society existed which did not
establish ideological hegemony — especially in popular
institutions — for “no class can hold power over a long period of
time without at the same time exercising its hegemony over State
Ideological Apparatuses.” (Althusser) Just as in economics, the
ultimate condition of social existence is the reproduction of the
conditions of production. Ideology functions as a means to ensure
social cohesion: to bind the individual to day-to-day practices,
and to establish an acceptable discourse which dominates our
culture.
IDEOLOGY AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
Studying the role of ideology in society is of vast
importance, particularly for its implications in the class struggle.
In order to grasp an accurate picture of the world around us it is
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necessary to apply these concepts to our analysis of society. First
and foremost, we must look at the material circumstances which
condition our consciousness. This includes the material existence
of ideology embedded within the dominate social institutions.
The intellectuals and orators of bourgeois ideology speak
of the “end of ideology” (ideology in the sense of bodies of
ideas). For they see liberal-capitalism as the be all end all, the
most progressive and developed organization of society.
However, it can be seen how bourgeois ideology ultimately fails
by professing its inherent permanence. The philosophical liberal
foundation of bourgeois ideology sees individuals as abstract
beings outside of concrete socio-economic relations by assigning
individuals with ‘natural rights,’ chiefly the right of property.
However, these ‘rights’ cannot be natural per se because they are
merely the naturalized conditioned modes of socio-economic
relations (i.e., the reflected material conditions). The significance
of this conclusion is simply that capitalism is only a stage of
development within the arena of history; the socio-economic
conditions which ultimately produced bourgeois philosophy
differed in the past, and can change again. Only by understanding
the laws which set in to motion the development of society can
we theorize the proper way in which emancipation can occur.
This is what Marx expressed his famous Theses on Feuerbach,
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it.”
In conclusion: [1] the materialist conception of history
allows us to understand how consciousness is conditioned by
modes of production [2] therefore the dominant ideas of any
epoch are merely an expression of the dominant material
relations [3] liberal (idealist) philosophy exists to reinforce
capitalist relations of production [4] with the development of
society emerges the seeds for a new social order, and [5] our
recognition of these concepts allows us to theorize how
emancipation can be realized.

There is perhaps nothing more dangerous to socialism
than sectarianism. Sometimes it seems we forget that there are
goals to meet tomorrow, and goals to fight over years from now.
We forget how much we agree on. Instead of a large organization
with an answer for everything which invariably splits into
numerous contending parties, it may be better to avoid creating
organizations which attempt to have a wide range of goals, and
focus on creating numerous organizations with a small set of
specific goals and practice. If we all come to the table focused on
a project which we find agreeable with our ideologies,even if we
vehemently disagree with other projects or aspects of some
ideology, we can come together by the thousands. It might mean
more emails, phone calls, and snail mail, but it could also mean
larger,more powerful communities which find solidarity easier to
make into a reality.
One organization which allows for anarchists and
communists and so on to work together organizing workplaces is
the Industrial workers of the World. They are a growing radical
rank and file industrial union. They are defined as a non-political
organization, meaning simply that they are a union and not a
party. They wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t endorse a candidate, wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t donate money to
one, etc, they are focused on their task:organizing workers into
one big union. They allow members to be in political parties and
other unions(with some minor restrictions). This allows them to
be larger, network better, and so on, than if they also entered into
the political mechanizations of supporting candidates or if they
were overly restrictive on the affiliations of their members.
The left needs to work together and the IWW sets an
example on how various leftists can act in solidarity. Could that
example help solve the rifts in our political choices through
having us move from the broader programs, to single issue or
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closely related issue parties? If two leftists disagree on a few
issues, they should find ways to work together on what they do
agree with. We have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our
chains.

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THE STUDENT MOVEMENT AND THE PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE
Salrab Miran

Like almost any progressive political movement that
receded in the early 90s, the international Left student movement
likewise has suffered and is in the stage of rediscovering its sense
of balance and purpose. In the US particularly, the student
movement had seen more glorious days. At its peak, it was
capable of considerable influential power; it threw a wrench in
the works of imperialism when it mounted a formidable
mobilization and protest against the war on Vietnam. The threat
to the ruling class from Leftist student radicalism was so great
that widest means of state repression were brought down upon it
to weaken, break up, and destroy the movement. FBI infiltration,
university expulsions, imprisonment and murder were all
employed by the oppressive state apparatus in characteristic
fashion. The decline of the student movement was further
precipitated by factional splits, ideological dogmatism and
adventurist acts of violence. And when the restoration of
capitalism in the USSR itself occurred in 1991, intellectuals
widely discarded Marxism as a revolutionary force. It is from
such a series of setbacks that the student movement now emerges
in the new world, and must now build again.
Many modern communists might even be tempted to ask:
where do students and the student movement fit in to the struggle
for Socialism? To some Communists, it is an appealing thought
that students are an unreliable petty-bourgeois force, and that
since the primary antagonism that defines world capitalism is a
conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, all the focus
should go towards the task of building a party of the proletariat.
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SolidaritĂŠ: Journal of the Radical Left

After all, was it not Marx who wrote in the Communist Manifesto
that the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class? The
tendency among some participants to think of the Socialist
movement in black or white exclusivist terms has long persisted
in the Socialist movement, but it is a non-dialectical way of
thinking. It is true that the proletariat is the only really
revolutionary class for several reasons. The tendency of capitalist
development is to proceed in the direction of eliminating the old
classes associated with previous economic systems. For instance,
capitalist development converts the peasants into wage laborers
gradually and definitely by abolishing the system that was
compatible with the peasant class (still very much existing in less
advanced third-world capitalist countries). In production,
capitalist development creates the appropriators of surplus value
(the capitalists), the managers of production, and the wage
laborers who create the surplus value (the proletariat) who cannot
end this historically most recent form of exploitation without
abolishing capitalism itself. It is in that way that the proletariat is
the only revolutionary class. However, it is an obvious fact that
the proletarian movement, like any other force or object, is in
constant interaction with other forces. The working class has seen
its own share of political splits, vacillations, ideological
confusion and support for downright reactionary regimes or
movements, i.e., it is not a magically pure class incapable of
making grievous mistakes. It does not and cannot move in a
linear direction because it does not exist in isolation from what
surrounds it. And this is precisely why the question of the student
movement bears such high importance for Socialism.
It must not be forgotten that Leninâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own involvement in
politics began as a student radical at Kazan University. And who
can forget that Fidel Castroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ascent into radicalism began in the
turbulent atmosphere of the University of Havana? Many of the
present day mobilizers of labor in the United States received their
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SolidaritĂŠ: Journal of the Radical Left

early training in student outfits such as SDS. We have hundreds
of other such examples of major revolutionary careers around the
world being forged in the fires of university activism. The fact is
that the student movement is a critical component of the
proletarian struggle and no struggle for Socialism has ever
occurred in the absence of a student movement.
But the real significance of students in the proletarian
struggle can be understood from Leninâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s observation:
â&#x20AC;&#x153;The history of all countries shows
that the working class, exclusively
by its own effort, is able to develop
only trade union consciousness,
i.e., the conviction that it is
necessary to combine in unions,
fight the employers, and strive to
compel the government to pass
necessary labor legislation, etc. The
theory of socialism, however, grew
out of the philosophic, historical,
and economic theories elaborated
by educated representatives of the
propertied classes, by intellectuals.
By their social status the founders
of modern scientific socialism,
Marx and Engels, themselves
belonged
to
the
bourgeois
intelligentsia. In the very same
way, in Russia, the theoretical
doctrine of Social-Democracy arose
altogether independently of the
spontaneous
growth
of
the
working-class movement; it arose
52

Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

as a natural and inevitable outcome
of the development of thought
among the revolutionary socialist
intelligentsia. In the period under
discussion, the middle nineties, this
doctrine not only represented the
completely formulated programme
of the Emancipation of Labour
group, but had already won over to
its side the majority of the
revolutionary youth in Russia.”
(Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?)
Part of the reason that this is true is that the working class
is often so steeped in intense labor and an everyday struggle for
survival that it rarely has the luxury of pursuing deep intellectual
pursuits. Exploring Marxism as a theory of political struggle is
definitely a time consuming venture, and it is even intimidating
for beginners given the vast body of literature it has created. The
intensification of labor, besides serving the purpose of extracting
as much surplus value, also serves the purpose of draining the
working class mentally and exhausting it physically. It is a means
to chain them to a life of stasis. Thus the working class needs
class traitors at its side who come from backgrounds that allow
the time and luxury of contemplating Socialist ideas that can then
be widely disseminated. Students have the potential to be
valuable allies of the working class.
So just how should one go about building a student
movement? Building a student movement is not as simple a task
as catching students in a net and exclaiming to them, “Now you
shall struggle for the workers!” Students always have their own
preoccupations which will often take precedence over the
Socialist struggle, such as playing video games or socializing. It
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Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

is frankly very similar to the situation of an ordinary worker who
comes home from a hard day’s work and the last thing on his
mind is, “Finally, now I have time to study about the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall in Das Kapital!” It is much more likely
that the worker will sit down on his couch, open a can of beer and
watch TV, which will probably be the source of most of his
intellectual diet. And this really is just perfect for the capitalists
who do everything they can to rear generations of people into a
lifestyle of consumerism to keep them preoccupied and distant
from the real prize: Socialism. Interestingly, this is not a problem
faced only by present day activists in the student movement. This
problem has always existed in different forms everywhere and in
every country. The old SDS for example faced this problem
numerous times and activists would grumble about the apathy of
most students in periods when the conditions just weren’t there.
When there is an absence of revolutionary conditions which can
jolt masses of people into action, there is a lull which is hard to
break people out of, and yet, it is precisely the ability of
revolutionaries to patiently and imaginatively energize people in
such difficult times that provides the surest measure of the
vitality of the Socialist movement. Also, students are for all
intents and purposes as wary, if not more, as workers who make
contact with revolutionary activists for the first time. Until the
time a union or pressure group is formed, there is a fear on the
part of the worker that association with an activist may result in
his dismissal by the management. It is quite similar for students
who fear expulsion from the University because they have only
heard spook stories about the evils that Communists might do. In
every domain, capitalism places these obstacles that Communists
must work around.
It should thus go without saying that those who are
involved in student activism must bear this in mind and adopt
methods of struggle which capture the imagination of students
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Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

and excite them. The venerated anti-Fascist stalwart Georgi
Dimitrov strongly emphasized in one of his works that it was not
enough to “be right” in one’s view of politics, for to pursue a dull
approach to agitation is to agitate against one’s own cause.
Capitalism knows of thousands of ways to dazzle, amaze and
inspire with its false dreams. But unfortunately, Socialist activists
persist in decades old methods of interaction with students.
Socialist activists ought to also use concerts, music, artistic
expression, humor and standup comedy, street theater
performances, movie and documentary screenings among others
to propagate their political ideas. It is false that one cannot mix
entertainment with politics. History furnishes many examples of
popular, influential and profound music and filmography that has
been in the domain of politics. That is not to say that this should
be a substitute for regular Marxist Political Schools, leaflets,
posters, literature, or demonstrations. But it is of high importance
that Socialist activists should not appear to ordinary students as
something out of the past or as an unacceptable oddity.
It is necessary to be able to relate to your audience, to
understand what they want, and be able to make your politics as
relevant as possible and present it in as interesting a way as
possible. One certainly cannot thrust one’s views on to anyone
and expect success. It is important not just to understand the
consumerist obstacles capitalism has placed in the way of
Socialists who wish to reach out to students, but to also be able to
relate the Socialist struggle to the unique problems that students
face. It is important, for instance, to pick up the issue of tuition,
the issue of student loans which capitalism uses to keep students
in chains for years even after they graduate, or the issue of the
deteriorating quality of education, for few things are as effective
for mobilizing a class as those based on self-interest. And for all
other political issues, it is well worth evaluating additional
methods of struggle to prepare a movement.
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SolidaritĂŠ: Journal of the Radical Left

One issue also worth mentioning that separates American
student politics from that of other countries is that it has
historically maintained an independence or reluctance to affiliate
with a revolutionary political party, and has suffered as a result.
To be sure, political parties such as the Black Panther Party and
the Progressive Labor Party did compete over SDS in the 1960s
without much success (in fact contributed to the destruction of
SDS). But in India or Greece for instance, the student movement
is much stronger and holds real sway over educational
institutions. This is in no small part due to the experienced
leadership and consultation that the political parties they are
associated with can provide. There is a strong tendency among
student Socialists to be against affiliation with a revolutionary
political party, which is an inherently contradictory way of
thinking since the struggle for Socialism is a political one that
never has and never will occur in the absence of a party of the
proletariat, and furthermore, upon graduation, the common way
to continue activism is through a political party. On the flipside,
it is equally common to meet students who immediately associate
themselves with the first political party they come into contact
with, irrespective of how inane its politics may be. Although it is
true that the various Socialist or Communist Parties in the United
States have their own student chapters in colleges and
universities, the fragmentation that occurs from this state of
affairs is detrimental to the student movement. There are at least
two ways for the student movement to overcome this
fragmentation, or factionalism rather, and the confusion about
political parties. One is through open theoretical and political
debates conducted in an atmosphere of integrity. The other, more
difficult and sometimes bitter way, is through experience. Either
way, it is the truth that must unite the students.
The final, most important point that any sincere
discussion of the student movement must cover is what its
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Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left

ideological foundations must be. Although practically all student
movements that have changed anything for the better in the world
have been Leftist in orientation, this is a sub-optimal scenario.
The student movement must be a Marxist-led one. This is of
course, easier said than done, because student mobilizations
frequently to strive to be large and inclusive. And furthermore, it
is impossible for any movement to be completely Marxist in
character. “Unity” is often the watchword. However, history
shows that unities built on compromise over principles are often
short-lived, they sooner or later break apart, or in other cases,
some forces get shortchanged while others emerge stronger.
There are tactics such as the “United Front” that have been used
to success, but these too are mostly temporary alliances. The goal
of Communists at the end of the day is not to unite with the
irreconcilable; it is to bring about a Communist revolution.
It was Marx who once said, “the ideas of the ruling class
are in every epoch, the ruling ideas, that is, the class which is the
ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force.” In other words, in order to defeat an
oppressive ruling class, one must start by challenging its ideas.
Once the ideas of oppressors no longer rule over us, that is when
their time will run out and they must face the music. It is
precisely in these institutions of learning, the universities and
colleges, where a capitalist society churns out its next generation
of leaders who must prop up the system. So, it is in the colleges
and universities where the battle of ideas must take a sharp and
pronounced turn, presenting a decisive challenge to the ideas of
the ruling class. This is the significance of the student movement
to the proletarian struggle.
Salrab Miran is a member of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party of
Pakistan and was the Founding President of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) at the University of Texas at Dallas.

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